What distinguishes a thinking person from a plant, an individual from a stone, a personality from dust? What allows you to rise above the routine of being and, looking back, analyze the situation, your own mistakes and overcome uncertainty? It is reflection - the ability of human thinking to critical introspection.
Translated from the Latin reflexio - turning back. A reflective person is able not only to critically look at the world around him, but also to analyze his actions, thoughts and the results of his life activity within the framework of his life experience. This is not a trivial recollection, a teddying of "things of bygone days", nostalgia. This is a thought process that can change for the better the future of the individual, his life attitudes, his self-determination.
In a psychological interpretation, to reflect means to consciously and soberly perceive the contents of your consciousness, your life experience.
A bit of history. Reflection and Spirituality
Reflection was paid attention in ancient Greek philosophy: Socrates highlighted the process of self-knowledge of a person, the subject of which was spiritual activity and itscognitive functions. A person who rejects knowledge and refuses self-knowledge is not able to become a spiritual and moral person, is not capable of development. To reflect means to develop, to grow spiritually.
In Plato and Aristotle, reflection and thinking were attributes inherent in the demiurge, the divine mind. Only the supermind, in their understanding, was capable of the unity of thought and thought. This concept passed into Neoplatonism, which argued that reflection is nothing but the peacemaking activity of a deity. This theory is not without meaning and is found in modern interpretations. The fact is that reflection can be performed from two positions. The first position is when comprehension occurs by an individual: Self-reflection. Who knows me better than myself and can analyze my thoughts and aspirations? Only myself.
Second position - not-I-reflecting. But who but me can penetrate my consciousness? Only God with personality.
Thus, a believer does not just reflect and experience his actions, he scans his experiences, thinking about how God treats his actions. Is his life righteous, is he sinful.
The result of such reflection is doubled, and the effect of such introspection is certainly stronger.
Reflective person
Within the framework of many philosophical concepts, reflection is considered as one of the more essential properties of consciousness. In accordance with this statement, only those beings who are aware of the states of theirpsyche. Simply put, a person who is not able to analyze his mental states cannot be called a thinker. Emotional, creative, but not thinking.
Reflection of a newborn is equal to zero - he perceives the world around him as a given, parents - as an unconditional component of this world. In the process of growing up and increasing autonomy from parental care, the growing individual begins to see and comprehend contradictions. This causes him to accept or reject parental authority, a critical understanding of the actions of loved ones. The mechanism of reflection has been launched, and from now on a person is only able to improve and grow spiritually and morally.
Reflection of individual people cannot be the same. Its level also differs depending on the age of the person. Reflection has the greatest activity and amplitude at the very beginning of the development of the human personality - at the stage of childhood and adolescence, youth. By the middle of the life path, reflection noticeably reduces the rhythm, and by the end of life it completely freezes.
Can I develop my reflection?
As it became clear, for any person to reflect means to grow above oneself spiritually. Is it possible to work on this process, stimulate your spiritual and moral development?
What does it mean to reflect? To put it simply, to reflect means to respond to external stimuli. Conflict, problems, confrontation, dialogues, choices, doubts - all this happens to a person every day. The more experiences a person has, the morericher its reflective amplitude.
A reflective person is a kind of psychoanalyst of his own, able to pose a problem and find a solution in his own experience, in his experiences.
The peculiarity of a living mind is that it only needs to see and hear a little, so that it can then think for a long time. You can try the method of thoughtful rethinking of a work of art in relation to any person. How many hours do you think about a book you have just read, a movie you have seen, a painting you have seen? Hour, day, week? Do you project events from the book onto yourself, do you try to analyze your actions in the context of a fictional plot?
This is your reflective training. A kind of reflection training, you can recommend writing out on a sheet of the most significant and important issues that worry you throughout your life. After collecting them in one place, try to mark the questions with markers of different colors and find out what most of your questions are about. About the meaning of life? About your activity? About relationships with others? About the material component? About the future?
After analyzing your aspirations in this way, you can continue your reflection in the most problematic direction, becoming more perfect and continuing your own spiritual development.
Gender Approach
There is a theory of gender approach to the process of reflection. According to this stereotype, it is implied that women are more prone to reflection than men, and this is supposedly due to a more subtlemental regulation of the weaker sex. This controversial claim has no scientific evidence to back it up.
There are a number of observations by psychologists in which there are different manifestations of reflection in representatives of different sexes.
Thus, it has been found that women with a low level of reflection are more inclined to defend their own interests to the detriment of the interests of another. Simply put, low intellectual, non-reflective female personalities are more scandalous and have a more quarrelsome nature. Whereas reflective female representatives prefer to find a compromise and get away from the scandal than to be involved in the conflict.
A reflective man, on the contrary, in a conflict situation acts as a fighter defending his interests. Men with a minimum indicator of reflection will demonstrate adaptive, opportunistic behavior in a conflict situation.
So, summing up the above, we can say with confidence that reflecting means being a person who thinks, feels, analyzes. This property of human nature distinguishes us from other representatives of the living world, and it is this property that can bring the human personality to a new, qualitatively different level of development.
